Howard County joins MAEDC

Tuesday

Apr 9, 2013 at 10:51 AMApr 9, 2013 at 10:56 AM

DREW VAN DYKEMMI Editor

Membership in the Moberly Area Economic Development Corporation has grown to four counties.

Per release late yesterday morning (Monday, April 8), Corey Mehaffy, President of the MEADC, announced that Howard County has officially joined Cooper, Monroe, and Randolph counties in the economic development cooperative.

Mehaffy and Russ Freed, current MAEDC Board Chair, attended a meeting of the Howard County Economic Development Council Board of Directors Monday morning (April 8), during which a “contract between the two entities was executed.”

Mehaffy mentioned, in particular, the communities of Fayette, Glasgow, and New Franklin as recognized new editions to the regional group.

“With the addition of the industrial park in Fayette, rail access in Glasgow, and the river port in New Franklin, the number of business parks in the four-county region has grown to nearly a dozen different options,” said the MAEDC release. “In addition the river access through the Howard-Cooper County Port Authority on the Missouri River at Boonville is an important benefit for the entire region.”Fayette has also been the home of Central Methodist University for nearly 160 years.

“This is our first four-year university in our partnership, which is going to be a big advantage for us.,” Mehaffy said.

The agreement is effective “immediately” — it was signed on Monday — and will continue for a three-year initial term. Howard County will be asked to contribute $80,000 annually for the MAEDC’s economic development representation, which will include “business attraction and marketing efforts, business retention and entrepreneurship development.”

Mehaffy describes each as such:

• Business attraction and marketing efforts: “We work with the major employers in all the counties that we serve. We let the contacting agency tell us who that is. The reason we do that is most of those counties have a Chamber of Commerce — a downtown association — and we don’t want to come in and step on anybody’s toes or do work that someone else is already doing. We’ll visit them regularly, and provide labor force data, wage and salary surveys — any types of the data they need from the databases we have access to. Sometimes, that’s demographic information. We meet with them several times a year, regularly, just to talk about those kinds of things.”

• Business retention: “We’ll be having the counties in on our marketing efforts when we’re out talking with other companies that are looking to either do an expansion opportunity or a new project. The nice thing about that from our perspective is that there are some assets in Howard County now that the other counties [in our cooperative] didn’t have. That’s kind of how we choose which counties we want to partner with. It’s not really about having more counties in the partnership, or having more money in the partnership. It’s about counties that have assets that the other counties don’t have.”

• Entrepreneurship: “Most of that happens now through our “Grow Mid-Missouri” program. Because of [it], we’ve got a much larger emphasis on the infrastructure of entrepreneurship. We’ve got the online resources available now. [We] still have the face-to-face mentoring and coaching like we had before, but now, we’ve got those online resources.”

Mehaffy told the MMI on Monday afternoon that the aforementioned county payout figure (the $80,000) was “basically done by population. [The MAEDC] board decided several years ago [that the money paid out would be] based on population and size.”

Howard County will be paying the same out as Monroe County annually ($80,000). Cooper County pays $100,000 per year. Randolph County, as described by Mehaffy, is the “largest contributor by far” to the MAEDC. Moberly and Randolph County, combined, pay $190,000 into the cooperative pool each year.

These moneys “allows [the MAEDC] to cover office expenses for additional hours, and to take on additional personnel,” Mehaffy said. When the cooperative expanded from two counties to threes, for example, they had to add an additional economic developer to the team.

Private chip-ins also add to the pot, though Mehaffy said that they don’t usually divulge such donor names or amounts to the public.

Howard County has reportedly been hosting fundraisers for the past several months to build up the funds to join the cooperative effort.

Like partners Cooper and Monroe counties, Howard receives one voting seat on the MAEDC Board of Directors for the term of the agreement. Per Mehaffy, Kirk Biere, an alderman from Glasgow, has been chosen to fill this role, as of Monday afternoon. Biere was selected by the Howard County Economic Development Council Board of Directors. Final approval was issued for him by the current MAEDC Board.

The MAEDC currently holds alternate offices (outside of the Moberly office on Williams St.), in Paris, Mo. (Monroe County) and Boonville, Mo. (Cooper County), where their economic developers can go to have contact within each respective partner area.

Howard County officials are considering split office spaces in Fayette and Glasgow as an option, said Mehaffy.